Introduction

Sorghum [Sorghum bicolor (L. Moench)] is the world’s fifth most important cereal crop, in terms of both production and area planted. It is an increasingly relevant grain crop due to its resilience to drier and hotter climates. In the United States, sorghum is typically grown in dryland areas from South Dakota to South Texas and Texas accounts for ~1.8 million of the United States’ ~5.8 million acres of sorghum production.

The idea for this visualization project is to use the Texas A&M Variety Testing and USDA NASS data repositories on grain sorghum production to visualize yield and production trends for the state of Texas.

Inspiration

First, there already exists at least two examples of mapping the county-level production of sorghum acres. The USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service’s reported maps and Zachary Stansell’s tool to map USDA crop data which uses these APIs.

Further, we are motivated to go beyond a static map and create a dynamic choropleth map like Zachary Labe’s depiction of Arctic Sea Ice Volume/Thickness. This is a gif but an interactive approach could allow you to slide through years and see the changing geographic heat map of Texas’ grain sorghum trends. Lastly, the regions of texas could provide the categories for a stream graph depicting a variable’s distribution over the years.

Sketch